Alone in Berlin film review 4Alone in Berlin film review Emma Christie

Vincent Perez’s Alone in Berlin opens with a
crystalline, silent shot of the French forest at Compiègne, bathed in cold
morning light – followed immediately by the crack of fatal gunfire.

So begins also the exquisite play of contrasts that characterises the film, which opens in cinemas on Friday, having been among the official selection at 2016's Berlin Film Festival. We witness the death of a German soldier, whose face, in sharp focus, reveals that he is barely old enough to grow a beard – only to be transported to Berlin, where a paper-boy’s triumphant cry of ‘Victory in France!’ rings through the streets. Even before we meet Otto and Anna Quangel, a working-class couple living in the German capital, the bitterness, psychological anguish, and deep ironies of existence under the Nazi regime are already painfully clear.

For Otto (Brendan Gleeson) and
Anna (Emma Thompson), the death of their son on
the front line leeches any meaning from their lives. The couple withdraw into
anxious isolation. Otto begins to protest the regime through the only means
available to him, hiding handwritten messages of vehement dissent in the
stairwells of Berlin’s crumbling apartment buildings. It is only a matter of
time before the authorities are on their trail – even as the desperate mission
continues: 'Mother, Hitler murdered my son. Mother, Hitler will murder your
son.'

Based on a true story, the film’s tragedy derives partly from the inevitability of the Quangels’s fate, but
equally from the brilliance of Perez’s enactment of author Hans Fallada’s
central preoccupation in the original book: of what it means to be totally and
truly alone. In Nazi Berlin, residents – whether safe from persecution, or in
hiding – exist on a knife-edge and in psychological isolation.

A glance
exchanged between a retired judge standing in an apartment window and a Nazi
Officer in the street below can seal a fate. A heart-stopping moment in which a
cheerful troop of Hitler Youth brush past Anna, ignorant of her transgression,
contrasts her quiet terror with their destructive enthusiasm. The characters of
Alone in Berlin cling to objects and
places that symbolise a safer past. Frau Rosenthal, a neighbour of the Quangels
who, it is implied, is Jewish, returns at night to her ransacked flat, risking
death. Below her, Otto whittles a rudimentary bust of his dead son, of whom
there remains no trace. The constant, crippling anxiety and solitude of many
Berliners in the 1940s is vividly rendered.

Alone in Berlin is visually stunning. There is a
remarkable attention to detail in every shot, and Berlin’s apocalyptic wartime
architecture – crumbling buildings, ancient lifts, blackened fireplaces,
facades out of a Riefenstahl film –
is made use of to choreograph fraught chase scenes. Perez neither
shrinks from nor over-indulges in brutality on screen: the violence perpetrated
against those who resist the regime retains its ability to shock on the rare
occasions that it appears.

Gleeson, as rough-hewn as the wood he painstakingly
carves, delivers a magnificent performance as a tortured and yet eerily calm
Otto. Only Daniel Brühl’s transformation, as Officer Escherich, from Nazi
bloodhound to resistance sympathiser is too rapid and too impassively acted to
be convincing. Nevertheless, in Fallada’s bleak vision of the capital, there is
a pervasive sense in which all of the film’s characters are alone in Berlin,
each moving with the utmost care and with deep-seated terror through the city
streets, with both the regime and the resistance moving toward the same
inevitable fate.